People in colleges still think that if they want to sound cool and smart and critical, they need to be Marxist.

Why this musty and discredited ideology crafted in a German library more than 100 years ago should seem "new" and "edgy" is beyond me but we are still burdened with it everywhere as "criticism."

My comment, in case it is deleted:

Mike Meyer has produced here probably the best coverage of Morozov's early life in Belarus and Bulgaria for the record -- and also exposed some of his Soros influences/controls and given us more of Lenny Benardo than we have probably ever had in our lives, and ever will have, despite his outsize influence on Eurasian civil society. Good!

But he left out the point where one of two things likely happened. Either 1) the time where Evgeny's kurator in the KGB or FSB or GRU recruited him and deployed him particularly against US government Internet freedom programs, of which he was a high-profile and vociferous critic at the time of the Arab Spring -- and against the powerful Silicon Valley in general which is partly an enemy of Putin or 2) (what's more likely) the time when Evgeny got recruited to some Trotskyist sect, the kind Meyer or Benardo themselves admire or are even in themselves or were in their youth, which is seemingly against Soviet tyranny but in fact is so anti-capitalist and anti-Americanist that it winds up serving the Kremlin's agenda in the end. Or maybe Zhenya came to his sour Brezhnevian socialism all on his own, after one too many Zizek readings, and someday we can expect a book titled "Parting with My Illusions" like Vladimir Posner.

Or maybe he's just figured out, like the quintessential Eurasian *grantosos*, that his more permanent gig at a university will require him to sound if not like Noam Chomsky than at least like Peter Ludlow.

If you can't make out Morozov's technocommunism, you're not paying attention. Look in particular at the stuff published in the German press -- obsessive rants about "neo-liberalism" and "Snowden as commodification and monetarizing of information" blah blah. Then there's that state committee -- presumably run just by smart people like himself and his Soros friends or ex-friends -- that will determine if Apple's design is appropriate or not -- yes, he proposed that in a TNR article.

In 16,000 words on O'Reilly, Morozov never mentioned his outsized honoraria, and he never got to the point: which is that O'Reilly is all about "communism for thee and not for me" and for mechanizing civil society so that coders control it -- as I pointed out in 2010:

Oh, I know a constituency that will bankroll Morozov's ideas --- Organizing for America, the left wing of the Democratic Party, and the Soros soft money in the NGOs in the Elizabeth Warren campaign. See you in 2016!

***

Now if you read my critique of O'Reilly, you might wonder, but catfitz, if you are criticizing the oligarchs of Silicon Valley for their greed, if you are

Well, the difference is that I am happy to have capitalism, corporations, small, medium and large business. And unlike John Young of Cryptome, let's say, I'm utterly unwilling to pretend that Constitutional law and the rule of law are some fictions or class-based superstructures or whatever this version of Marxism says they are. Sorry no sale.

I think that the answer to the greed of Facebook or the conniving manipulation of O'Reilly is more capitalism, not less, more democracy, not less -- and that's why I'm not an authoritarian Marxist like Morozov.

Here's my prediction -- and not for 2014, but 2016.

Morozov will be put in a position like Alec Ross had at the State Department, which will be his ultimately fantasy -- well not quite, because he's rather be in the National Security Council or some higher position where he can work on dismantling the American democratic state more furiously and effectively than he can as a twitterer and scholar giving lectures.

12/29/2013

Have you noticed how desperately Evgeny Morozov has been trying to get attention for himself, ever since Edward Snowden's big hack completely eclipsed him?

He has gotten more and more zany with his aphorisms on Twitter, and now the gloves are off, and the mask is off, and he's come clean on his technocommunism -- nore more hiding it behind a "critique of technology" as if he were just a typical university liberal or lefty -- he's become more shrill and edged now:

See, anybody who tells you about "radical shifts in capitalism" (!) is a Marxist of some sort -- but only recently, with his Social Democratic sort of articles for the German press, has he been fretting about evil capitalism so openly.

Of course, it's always been lurking in his writings; I recall that awful misreading he made of Vaclav Havel's story about the state store.

God knows what kind of contrived thinking led to putting this together -- we're just shy of Time Cube here.

But this is what we get:

Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.

But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.

Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.

When Morozov lets us know that he finds this lovely global debate just not producing enough, he shows his hand: nothing less than Marxist revolution would do.

And here he tries to square the odd circle he has created by trying to find connections to his Brezhnevism:

Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.

Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?

Ah, so that's what this is about. It's realy about the Technolibertarian's technocommunism for us, where "we pretend to work" (we turn over our data and upload stuff) and "they pretend to pay us" (with a badly working and vexatious form of social media).

Morozov isn't content to discover the technocommunism right in front of us, however; he has to get more clever (the Zizek of the Internet set).

I'm all for paying for content online; Morozov isn't, and every time he needs a JSTOR article he can't access he just puts out a call for it on Twitter until somebody sends it to him who does.

From reading Morozov's past books and that really long TNR piece, I bet I know what he'd really like to see: a regime where we are given everything for free and don't pay for it with data, because....our wealth is redistributed as we make it by some central committee...

Is the Internet a Mob Without Consequenceshttp://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/is-the-internet-a-mob-without-consequence/?_r=012/24/2013Web

I am writing to urge you to investigate a situation whereby Nick Bilton, a writer for the Bits column, completely removed a subject of his story -- Anil Dash -- and his comments about Dash being "angry" -- merely because this influential Silicon Alley entrepreneur protested on Twitter about the way he was covered.

This publication -- and then removal under pressure -- was documented by Loren Feldman here:

As many of us know, Anil Dash is responsible for getting the CTO of Business Insider fired over a few off-colour and ill-advised misogynist tweets. Not only did he get him fired, he met with him in person and then threatened him with never getting funding for any start-up in Silicon Valley again -- over a few tweets! Fortunately, the man has now found a new job despite Dash's thuggish threats.

Dash is selective in his concern for such cases -- not every Silicon Valley personage will get this treatment for similar offenses or even real-life behaviour involving rape allegations.

It is hugely creepy when an influential person can force a New York Times journalist to erase something he wrote completely and put it down the memory hole. This is especially true when the NYT has a practice of putting elaborate correction statements below articles even for slightly mispelled names or incorrect locations. When a change of this magnitude is made to a story after publication, you owe it to the reader to print a correction and explanation. In this case, the text really should be restored, and if Dash doesn't like what is said about him, he can write a comment or a letter to the editor.

Anil has tweets up which Loren Feldman reproduces, expressing outrage that Bilton wrote about his "anger" without first clearing it with him (!), and he ended up getting himself removed from the column.

Loren wrote a comment about this on the Bilton alticle but it didn't show up. I did, too, linking to Loren's blog, and I doubt it will clear the NYT censors, either, because they hate comments that talk about flaws in reporting itself or start something with the journalist himself.

So that's when you write to the Ombudsman, and I will be doing that, even though I know in advance she will not do a thing about it.

There are some people in Silicon Valley or Alley -- Anil Dash is in the Alley -- who are influential and powerful enough that they just get rid of the criticism about them. Paul Carr is one, as we saw. He could cover for Mark Ames of the old The Exile, who bragged about having sex with a 15-year-old girl in Russia -- bragging in his book that was never described as "fiction" -- and claim that Mark Ames is just telling tall tales. Except Mark Ames himself doesn't claim this, because if he did, then everyone would find his supposed gonzo journalism a lot less gonzo. Even as fiction, it's awful, and the sort of thing that if it were somebody else, Paul Carr and Anil Dash would be going crazy, as would Jillian York. But since it's not, and it's one of their own, they are silent. Disgusting.

One thing that always happens in these cases is that if you keep criticizing, they end up accusing you of being sexist or racist. I've had this slur slung at me from both Carr and Dash. First Dash let me know that he "intervened" to make sure my blog wasn't removed when he was at this blogging platform Typepad (!) -- to let me know I was "on sufferance". Ugh.

Then, I was given a "test" -- Dash sent me a link to a forum taking him down in the most racist and outrageous fashion. I'm supposed to spend my days condemning that, but I can never speak about "black crime" in our neighbourhood --- we live a few blocks from each other -- he in a lot nicer place than I do -- because, see, I would never speak of "white crime" (so he thinks) and therefore I can't speak about something that even Obama himself, in his speech, discusses, and in critical terms.

Indeed, I'm going to follow up on this soon in a blog post about anti-Indian sentiment that I think is growing in this country as Indians assume more public and powerful positions. And I'm also going to talk about how some of them have really bad ideologies and really bad behaviour and we have to be able to call that out without being charged with "racism".

So Paul Carr picked up the Wikipedia vandalism and the nonsense about my remarks concerning Romney's digital people not having their heart in the job because they were Democrats voting for Obama (um, no, I didn't claim black people put bugs in his software to make him lose, derp) -- and Carr, too, reached for this discreditor of claiming I am "racist".

This is how these people are, and the only thing you can do is keep calling them out, keep documenting, keep trying to name and shame.

12/23/2013

I don't have a TV, and haven't had one for ten years, so I didn't know what "Duck Dynasty" is. I had once seen a poster for the show on a bus shelter, and thought it was a one-time movie. Apparently, somebody decided to give it a far longer shelf-life so it's a sit-com or a series *shudder*. So I'll leave that one to others to dissect - Cathy Young has a particularly good piece about all his on RealClearPolitics.

Justine Sacco's saga, however, I watched unfold on Twitter, which is my main news source. That is, it isn't the things people say on Twitter that is my source, but merely the links it provides in a steady stream to all the major news stories in the world from a variety of perspectives.

Yes, we get it that this wretched woman Justine tweeted something completely assanine, stupid and yes, racist. And because she worked for a gigantic public relations firm, she was fired instantly and the company fell all over itself to apologize. Then she apologized. Loads of people got to beat their breasts in wild self-aggrandized self-justification with life-ruination as the goal. But when "the world" (which means that tiny percentage of people on the planet who a) have cell phones b) have Twitter c) get involved in "progressive causes") becomes involved in a story like this, it's mass hysteria and never ends well.

NO ONE SHOULD BE FIRED OVER A TWEET

Generally, I don't believe people should be fired from their jobs over Twitter. The engineering of the firing of the Business Insider CTO by Wired State apparatchiks Anil Dash and Jillian York was utterly reprehensible and shrinks freedom of expression ever smaller. If an employee tweets something incapatible with the company line, you should make sure he isn't on the company account, that his own account carries a disclaimer -- and then just not follow him if you don't like what he says. Make your own policy clear to your followers, and call it a day. When enough people start doing this as a matter of course, we'll get past this very bad period when a few very bad, very oppressive people are trying to control the speech of everyone for no good reason.

To be sure, I thought that the firing of @natsecwonk was appropriate because he was a government official anonymously tweeting, and tweeting government information that was not on the record, and that's simply incompatible with good government or oath of office. I don't think government officials should get to make anonymous accounts and then fire off nasty tweets about their colleagues and various tid-bits out of context to vent their spleen. If you want to do that, don't work for the government. Fortunately, @natsecwonk has found a second life as a consultant somewhere else and survived his ordeal.

But I don't think people in the private sector should be fired, however, because speech offenses should not be grounds for losing your very livelihood. There are a variety of penalties, from suspension, to compelling an apology, to doing community service, to making amends, to be shifted to another position, short of taking food off someone's table.

I REJECT TWITTER GAGS

Hey, I get to say this because I know what it's like to get a Twitter gag at work, and not for anything I've said on Twitter, but fear of what I *might* say on Twitter, merely because of what I said in criticism in the comments of the Registan.com blog, in response to some really vicious tweeters who then worked mightily to try to get me fired because they didn't like my legitimate and much-needed criticism of their reprehensible views slyly favouring Central Asian dictators: Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce.

Each one of these people is responsible for real harm to me and my family by literally removing food from my table by urging that I be fired -- and then hastening events whereby I quit anyway, because the conditions of work became unbearable. Interestingly, three out of these four themselves lost their jobs within a year, and probably their vicious tweeting had at least some role in their fates. I've recovered (although please do hit my tip jar), but I will never, ever work for anybody who says I can't tweet what I want on Twitter or will fire me over something I say on Twitter. If you don't like what I say on Twitter, don't follow me. Don't make it hard for me to feed my children. Thank you.

FIRST AMENDMENT SPIRIT

So again: I'm for people being called out and condemned if they say something either contrary to company policy or in poor taste or abusive and discriminatory. But bad speech should never be something that causes people serious injury like loss of employment or fining or jailing. That's contrary to the First Amendment in spirit, even if non-state actors can make policies falling short of the liberalism of the First Amendment because it only applies to government (although no one has ever tested the oppressiveness of government web sites that suppress speech exactly like any Silicon Valley social media provider in exactly the same ways with exactly the same language).

WHAT THIS REALLY IS ABOUT: POLITICAL WARFARE

The issue with Justine isn't just about the First Amendment and her theoretical right to say whatever crazy racist damn thing her airheaded whim moves her to say while drunk on Twitter. We get that her employer isn't bound by the First Amendment and for its own reputational integrity feels they have to fire her.

But no, it's about what kind of society we get when the consequences of misguided tweets are like Soviet Russia -- the GULAG -- and when we let virulently hateful politically-correct movements take over all politics and stamp out all dissent.

"The Internet" went wild, of course, in the way only "the Internet" can, with memes and fake accounts and "get her" posse antics. The smug sense of self-satisfaction was palpable everywhere.

And nowhere was it as bad as with Sam Biddle, the ValleyWag guy who is sometimes viciously funny, and sometimes funnily vicious and sometimes just uninteresting (I forget to read him for weeks at a time.) Drinking deeply of that Silicon Valley Better Worldism bullshit himself even as he always skews others, Biddle turned in this idiotic tweet:

No one cares that I was first but I will know I united black and white twitters. Welcome to post-racial twitter, you're welcome, god bless

Sam caught this woman because she was with the big PR agency (otherwise he might not have bothered) and there is nothing more that Silicon Valley types HATE with the passion of a thousand suns than PR firms, especially the East Coast type. Amanda Chapel had a long run taking down Edelman, until her enemies savagely outed her and slapped a libel suit on her. I can remember the Crayonistas calling every other company flak "fucktards" on the the Alphaville Herald. It's new media hates old media on this one and the skewer is sharp and twisted endlessly.

Um, post-racial Twitter? Really, big guy? You spear-head a movement of politically-perfect persons who have scrubbed racism entirely from their souls? You're sure?

But here's what this stuff is REALLY about, and why I happily push back hard against it every time I get a chance.

IT'S NOT ABOUT RACISM, BUT EXPLOITATION OF THE RACISM SMEAR

It's not really about stopping racism, or making a nicer social media environment, or a better post-racial world where everybody can hold hands and sing Kumbahah.

It's about using the racism card in a hard left or "progressive" or socialist movement to eradicate any opposition to the left by tarring it with the racism brush.

It's exterminism.

It's not about countering bad politics with good; it's about eliminating a rival that is sometimes correct in calling out the hypocrisy of the left.

Example: what did everybody miss on Twitter because they were obsessed with the drama of one ditzy white girl who was going to get a whallop when she landed in now black-ruled South Africa? (She herself was originally from South Africa in the minority, obviously).

They missed, oh, things like Ambassador Samantha Power, the US envoy to the UN, flying to the Central African Republic, which is the scene of a terrible bloodbath now with hundreds massacred, as Christians and Muslims clash around corrupt government leaders and abusive rebels struggling for power. Now, Teja Cole might whine that this is white saviour industrial complex but I don't care. I think it's fine for white people to care about Africa and try to help. Yes, we can all have a debate about how aid goes wrong in Africa. But hey, I don't notice African governments clicking REFUND on any of the aid -- hardly sufficient -- the rich world does dispense to Africa because the donors aren't politically correct enough or neo-colonialists.

Here's where I really get angry with this stuff though: when I see it is about completely demonizing the right. No conservative group, the Republic Party, anybody on the right, is legitimate unless they toe absolutely up to the line of what the hard left believes is the proper set of beliefs on race and sex and many other topics. And they get to decide. And it's not about demonizing the right, ultimately, it's about demonizing pluralism, period.

There's no universal standard they concede, like the idea that "racism" really worthy of getting "the whole world" involved would actually be advocating barring people from equality, or actually inciting mass crimes against humanity, not tweeting something idiotic to your few followers (I don't know how many she had before the scandal, but it wasn't the thousands she got after).

What kind of racism would that be? Well, aside from the speech racism that already gets enormous amounts of attention (of the ineffectual kind) on Twitter, how about the kind of racism that the World Conference Against Racism didn't care to focus on, like the hatred of the Dalit or "untouchables" in India, that caused so many people to take the side of an Indian diplomat in New York City who got the standard treatment of all detainees over her exploitation of her domestic worker, and not the worker, who is Dalit.

Bigoted or hateful talk is easily fixed - you push back and you let the person know how wrong they are, how out of touch they are, and how unacceptable they are in decent company. Taking food off their table in spite and vindictiveness hardly accomplishes these goals; indeed it sets us up for a worse situation where we have no pluralism or true equality and tolerance of differences in society.

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE BULLIED AS A 'RACIST'

I know what it's like to be endlessly bullied and harassed for my critical blog with the false use of the "racism" card. I've had my Wikipedia constantly vandalized; I've been smeared with the false accusation of racism; I've been deluged with thousands of spam or hate messages and I endlessly get attacked by a small group of sectarians plus a few high profile Silicon Valley "thought leaders" because of this blog entry.

Um, no, I didn't say that "Romney lost the election because black people deliberately sabotaged his digital work and put bugs in his code" (!). Derp. That's just loony and insane. Romney didn't lose merely because his apps crapped out -- there were many other reasons for his loss, notably the bugging of his lunch-time quip about "the 47%" (not to be confused with "the 99%") which he could never overcome -- and a concerted campaign to discredit him as "Richie Rich" although he was no George Soros. One ad even accused him of causing the death of a woman of cancer because her husband lost a job in a factory he bought out as it was failing, which then later laid off people -- something happening in the steel industry all over the world.

What I did say was that the people who did Romney's digital work did not have their hearts in the job; they included Obama's 2008 digital manager (!) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign digital manager (!) in a shop with people clearly voting for Obama, not Romney. And that's the case. They didn't have the enthusiasm that keeps you working late into the night, and they can't be expected to. And the result -- due to the kind of "geek sabotage" that doesn't involve literally building bug bombs but mainly involves cynical negligence -- two of his apps failed, and his GOTV software failed spectacularly. People paid to do a gig like any other gig as if this didn't require utmost dedication didn't produce. I notice some of them aren't with the firms involved anymore, and I bet we won't see Republicans hire gently-used Democrats for digital work ever again, just like Obama didn't hire Republicans for his computer nerd work. It's not about race or ethnicity; it's about what you believe, and who you will do for.

Yet because I reported the obvious, and made a legitimate point which had nothing whatsoever to do with advocating racism -- and it involved calling out lefty geeks as not very loyal to their clients -- I was bombarded savagely. And Paul Carr was the latest to join this insanity just on the strength of reading outageously fake Wikipedia vandal quotations and one tweet pointing out that yes, Mandela did embrace communism -- which is true -- and that in fact likely delayed the end of apartheid, a point you can read on the pages of the very liberal Foreign Policy web site if you don't want to hear it from me.

THE EXTERMINISM OF THE LEFT

But see that's just it. We cannot criticize the left anymore. Not from the slightly-less-left or left-of-center or liberal middle or right-of-center that might share similar views with the Nation on a variety of topics like abortion or NSA. Not at all. Because criticism -- any criticism of the left is "racism"or -- a topic for another day, "the war on women".

The Anti-fa crowd (I've come to find them always and everywhere intolerant, hateful, and liars in a variety of countries and settings; maybe someone can convince me otherwise) decided to savage people whose views they didn't like and out them by hacking Disqus.

Disqus, unfortunately, is too leftist itself and filled with the Silicon Valley technocommunism ideology (I've had a number of arguments with them even though I do use my account their regularly) to step up to the plate on this vigorously. They've said nothing (as far as I can tell).

But boy is this wrong, and everyone should push back hard on it. And you can see from the handiwork of these creeps in Sweden that it isn't about stopping racism really, or making a better world; it's about taking power aggressively by eliminating critics and political rivals through the smear of racism.

ANONYMITY, PSEUDONYMITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

I personally don't advocate anonymity on social media. I use my real name, and my avatar name is linked to my real name. I just like it better that way because I think people should be accountable for their words and they do by and large behave better when not anonymous and can build up a reputation, for better or worse.

I don't buy the arguments of AWFUL people like Jillian York of Electronic Frontier Foundation who insists on anonymity mainly as an organizing tool for revolutionary movements of the left she personally supports with her politics, mainly in the Middle East, none of which are very critical of Islamists and embrace the Palestinian cause while rarely condemning violence.

York like others falsely concern-troll with invocation of dissidents in trouble, or victims of domestic violence as requiring anonymity as a deadly necessity. Well, yes and no.

You know, Nelson Mandela used his own name; so did Andrei Sakharov; and for that matter, so dod Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot and Farea al-Muslimi, the Yemeni anti-drones activist. Yeah, I totally get it that activists in Iran, China and many other places risk their lives if they give their real names. But that's no reason to enable a zillion assholes from Anonymous to harass people online with impunity. And why should you get to turn out 100,000 on a public square while hiding behind a Guy Fawkes mask or a nick on Facebook or Twitter? Say, the Ukrainians didn't run their revolution that way.

It's possible to have pseudonymity, which is the use of a pseudonym and presentation of real-life ID on social media to create a better environment.

No, this shouldn't be mandatory everywhere but I do think it's more than fine that Facebook makes it a requirement (yes, often violated) and Twitter doesn't. It's good to have a pluralism of environments so you don't have to live only with abusive anonymous assholes online everywhere. And no, I don't have illusions that unmasking these people makes them better. Often it doesn't. But I do see the comment section of Techcrunch got a lot better when they put in Facebook for commenting, and worse when they changed it.

What the Justine ruckus demonstrates is not that there are racist people. We know that.

What it reveals, in fact, is that the reaction is precisely the kind of behavior that led to racism in the first place: the innate reactivity of shallow-thinking people to prove they are better than someone else.

The way the tweet-mongering crowd attacked an incompetent PR girl with lame sarcasm skills exemplifies the horrifying superficiality of thought that ramifies digital networks. Rather than taking on racism, we will have more of it - the racists now have even more fuel for their assaults because they see the vapidity of their enemies.

You will see more assassination of avatars while the cunning manipulators who daily strip the soul out of civilization continue to work their plans without chirping a single hashtag

Why am I writing so much about this now?

Because I think we will see LOTS LOTS more of this as the 2016 campaign gets going -- it's already going with vilification of the Clintons as in Ken Silverstein's hit job on CAP (more to come on that later).

I'll never forget when I tweeted a few tweets to Steve Gillmor at the dawn of Twitter and he went into a rage fit and demanded the company created search/block so that he would never have to see anyone who disagreed with him ever in his feed when he did vanity searches on himself. I continued to debate him strenuously and he actually invited me on his podcast show but then shut off the microphone as soon as I expressed the opinion that some of Obama's ideology was socialist. Shut off the microphone.

My original crime? I pointed out that his claims that Obama's pastor's outrageous remarks weren't anything to be complaining about just wasn't true, it was going to have huge ramifications. Obama himself wound up apologizing, so I tweeted to Gillmor that even Obama was criticizing this "America's chickens are coming home to roost" and "God Damn America" stuff of the pastor.

But then Dave Winer, the famous geek of Scripting News (and Firesign Theater) said -- I'll never forget -- "Everyone in the Northeast is racist."

Right. Everybody. Even the non-white folks, too.

And that's when I realized that the leftists, the technocommies, the "progressives" were going to endlessly race-bait and race-hustle to get their way in that election, and it would never end. Indeed, I began to suspect that some of them had deliberately decided to back a black candidate precisely so they could use this brilliant weapon endlessly keeping everybody silent for fear of being non-PC.

Obviously, "everyone in the Northeast" wasn't so racist that they couldn't vote for the first black president (including me). But Dave knows better.

So Justine did a dumb-ass thing and is paying for it dearly. She didn't actually do any harm because a million smug white dudes starting with Sam Biddle swooped in to save black people from suffering hate virtually on social media from someone that...they didn't have to follow and would never have heard of if Sam Biddle hadn't invented the scandal. Nobody complained that he and his enthusiastic meme-wranglers were part of the white savior industrial complex then. And there was a deluge of response with most pictorial comments consisting of some very tough and very angry black ladies from various TV sit-coms and movies (and nobody complained about their stereotyping then).

It's like the "Streisand effect," where if you try to stop the paparazzi from photographing you due to your desire for privacy, as Barbara Streisand once did, they just follow you worse.

The Biddle Effect is when something that wouldn't have been a scandal on its own (not enough people would ever see it) is artificially pumped up and used to incite action by cynical meme-handlers to enhance their own reputation and power. Biddling is when you heckle somebody to death using this method.

"Post-racial" Twitter and the Anti-Fa won, and they will proceed to stamp out all others' thought crimes who cannot admit the error of their ways. Unless you start now calling their bluff.

11/03/2013

You know, I had wondered why Jonathan Chait, who usually seems to be adversarial, was suddenly making all these propagandistic tweets about ObamaCare.

And this explains a lot -- Obama views columnists like Chait as "portals".

Once the adversarial journalists come out of the White House "off the record" meetings, they feel loved and accepted and can't help then tweeting Soviet-style happy stories.

The People's Health Care plan is going along swimmingly and if somebody is told to get off their insurance and that they must buy the more expensive ObamaCare, well, they just have shitty insurance and never really studied the terms of their shitty insurance so it's all their own fault.

10/30/2013

You know, if I could do just one thing to fix US 21st century public diplomacy and counterintelligence, whatever it takes, it would be to fix this: make it so that the world's Internet idiots get some pushback at the very highest and deepest levels on this notion that "the US has killed the most people in the world".

The US has never killed "the most people in the world" -- not in the past, not now.
That dishonour belongs to the Soviet Union, who has committed the world's worst mass atrocities -- bar none -- totalling some 50 million people; there are 6 million people killed in the Holodomor or terror-famine alone, and millions who executed or worked to death in the GULAG, not to mention entire "punished peoples," like the Crimean Tatars, stuffed into trains and sent to remote exile, dying along the way.

Ernst Ametistov, the Constitutional Court judge, a colleague of ours who died some years ago, once described to me how, as a small boy living in evacuation himself in Kazakhstan, he saw the bodies thrown off trains like that into the snow.

Even Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev had to admit that when the spring thaw came in Sverdlovsk, the river always turned up bodies from the mass graves...

Dmitry Prigov, God rest his soul, had a macabre poem that went something like this,
"Here a corpse, there a corpse, everywhere a corpse corpse."

The Soviet Union was entirely built and maintained on people's bones -- millions upon millions of them.

The strange meme that you meet on social media -- especially from people who should know better, like people who live in the former Soviet Union -- that "America has killed the most people in the world" is in part a result of the Kremlin's active measures and agents of influence. But it's also simply ignorance and stupidity. These people think if they see a war in front of them this minute, and the press covers American actions, then that's all there is to the story.

This stuff is so stupid, so unbelievable, that the intelligentsias of the world don't bother to counter it. They think it self-discredits.
But it doesn't. More and more ignorant Internet children are appearing spouting these idiocies. Even the wars that the US is in, whether you support them or not, involve not US troops killing most of the people, but militants supported by Iran or Syria or other bad actors, and terrorists like Al Qaeda. I started this site "Not Killed By American Troops" which I only maintain sporadically just to try to have some place to park all the links -- the stories of time after time, 50 people, 40 people, 100 people, 20 people killed in terrorist bombings -- and no one cares. No one wrings their hands. Nobody talks about the murderous terrorist policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No one condemns them.

They are "other people's civil wars" at best -- and then someone we are still to be blamed for them by showing up.

I'm for having an office in the State Department that does nothing but stop this meme in its tracks. I'm dead serious. It's becoming a national security disaster. If the Tsarnaev brothers grow up on the Internet watching Youtube and reading stupid comments and fora like this Facebook discussion, they believe that "America has killed the most people in the world" - and then they think their actions are justified. Jihadists in Africa and Asia think the same thing. They imagine they are in a just war. Most people never even stop to realize that more people were killed in Chechnya and the North Caucasus in 10 years -- by a very long shot -- than were ever killed in Israel/Palestine in the intifada years or following. Yet they got 1/100th the attention. I'm for stopping this. I'm really sick of it.

Barrie Hebb I
live in the former soviet union - you idiot!! And I would accept these
republics over your country any day!!!!! Your government murdered far
more people than Stalin - not that this makes Stalin okay - both are
wrong. But come on - democratically - Putin
has oddly won a democratic contest in a way that no US president ever
has - and this is sad - for Russia and for the the USA. Your country has
murdered and raped far more people than it has helped - and that is no
excuse. That you can name some people does not matter - those the USA
has harmed - there simply is no excuse. And i do not hold the USA to a
higher standard than Russia - those Russia has harmed I have also spoken
against - civilization knows no boundaries.

Barrie Hebb By
the way Catherine - you forget that the Taliban has been sponsored and
financed by - you guessed it - the USA - you are completely brainwashed
by the Tea Party you belong to - and you are, I assume, older than 18
and capable of reading - yet you make no use of it. And also the Al
Quaeda network is also well financed by, you guessed it - the USA - and
event he CIA admits this - I do not get your enemey list at all. And
Iran has been more than helpful to the USA- they have picked up the tab
for the reguees - more than 2 million - as a result of the USA attack on
an innocent country - Afghanistan - which never harmed anyone - Iran
paid for everything - and they never ever ever attacke danyone int he
past 100 years - unlike the usa - which has invaded illegally 75 % of
the worlds coverage - and raped , murdered, pillaged - people after
people. Burned the skin off children in Japan and m,any other countries.
You should be ashamed of yoruself for defening such terrorists. Really.
In my mind you are a vicious- stupid - terrorist ideogue - willing to
see anyone who disagrees with the myth of the USA destroyed. This is why
I rightfully cited you as a neo-Nazi before - and now - more than
before - I remain completely convinced you are a menace to civilization.
I wish you had the opportunity to got school, get an education, and
perhaps even meet people who are non-white - then maybe you would have a
different view.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Barrie
Hebb, Um, no. Even Wikipedia will explain to you that the US didn't
"finance the Taliban" and certainly didn't finance Osama bin Ladn. When
*your friend* the Soviet Union committeed a *mass crime against
humanity* and massacred MORE THAN A MILLION civilians in *their war*,
the US did indeed help some mujahedin fight back. Good! It's like Syria
today. There is a certain moral thing to do here. If you don't want
rebels to become radical anti-American Islamists, you need to have a
hand in. The US response was so late and so small it did little to
affect the outcome of the war -- in which, as I said, in case you're
still having comprehension problems, MORE THAN A MILLION people were
killed. I don't belong to any Tea Party, that's ridiculous. I'm a
registered Democrat. I voted for Obama the first time, and didn't the
second time, making a protest vote to Romney particularly over foreign
policy issues like Russia. As for your silly conspiracy theories about
Al Qaeda, what do you read, infowars? anti-war.com? Or some other crazy
conspiracy site? Afghanistan is not an "innocent country" when it
harboured the people who committed a crime against humanity on 9/11,
massacring 3,000 people and injuring numerous people and causing
millions of dollars of damage. No, international law accepts that in
that case, the victim gets to respond. You didn't see Lavrov weeping
over that. As for your notion that "Iran picked up the tab," the US has
funded refugee care for years, and Pakistan bore the brunt -- and they
are no angels, as it is their secret police supporting the Taliban all
along as everyone know. The OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of civilians killed in
THIS war were KILLED BY THE TALIBAN and its allies -- 85% according to
the UN. The other 15% are by Karzai and his allies. The US slice of this
is miniscule. It's bad enough, but utterly dwarfed by the Taliban. Your
bland and blind acceptance of THEIR raping, murder, pilllaging is just
breath-taking. Even Michael Anderson would concede the Soviet massacres
and the Taliban massacres and not wake up crap about the US being the
problem. As for burning the skin of children, I'm glad you care so much
about little children. The US using the atomic bomb against militarist
Japan is indeed a grave crime. Of course, it was response to all kinds
of grave crimes as well, including the rape of the "comfort women" and
of course murders of many. And if you care about little burned children,
we missed you in Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia where the Soviets and
their allies used chemical warfare -- or doesn't your memory stretch
back that far? I'm hardly a neo-Nazi. A person who doesn't believe your
Soviet communist views is a liberal, not a Nazi. I've had an
education, and guess what, including in Soviet Russia where I heard this
first hand. You're too young to reiterate Soviet propaganda circa 1970.
Free your mind, your ass will follow.

10/27/2013

Typical griefer effigy scene in Second Life, where my effigy is "cooked" by giant chickens, I am given a Soviet flag and Obama poster to harass me, and various objects are copybotted. Also featured is my picture from an interview I did for Wired critical of hackers.

Today I come back home to a slew of messages about a hate post by somebody who made a parody account against John Schindler, the former NSA analyst who is a professor at the Naval War College

This followed an attack on email, including Schindler's work email -- a guy calling himself "Tailgunner Joe" wrote to both Tom Nichols, another professor at NSA, and Schindler, for the express purpose of discrediting me.

I think what must have thrown him into a hate frenzy is that Tom Nichol simply tweeted that while there were many tinfoil hat comments in response to his recent post, I had some good analysis. Just that -- a simple tweet, hardly anything, and this hater went into attack mode.

In the emails, this creep brought up Second Life, the "AIDS journalist" video and other elements that I refute regularly in my "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters" column. It's an old story.

I thought "Tailgunner" might be one of my regular stalkers related to Second Life -- perhaps it was Taco Rubio (Charles Callistro of Louisville, KY), who served in the USAF, who was a regular inworld and outworld persecutor of me for years and years.

The picture used on my Wikipedia -- itself a work of vandalism regularly vandalized -- and in the XXTwitterWar Committee attack -- is cropped from a series of pictures his friend Chadrick forcibly took of me, where Taco put his arm around me and Chadrick to make it look like we were "friends". We aren't, of course. I don't object to photos being taken of me because I'm a public figure and I'm for free speech, but I point out that this was a picture taken to harass me. It was taken at the Second Life Community Conference in Chicago in 2007, and Taco -- a long time antagonist because of my critical blogging about favouritism at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life -- was furious at me because I blogged about the scandals in the organizing committee. His friends the convention organizers had not only run a deficit, but tried to make the musicians sign an agreement that would basically turn over all their intellectual property rights to the orgcomm and enable them to resell it. The musicians were so furious they quit en masse, and as a result, we had no live music at the event. I was among several bloggers and journalists who covered this scandal.

This was the same orgcomm that decided to ban me from the conference for my long-standing criticism of Second Life's elite, but also this conference's mismanagement. Interestingly, when the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble, whom I had befriended on Twitter, heard about this, he denounced it as horribly close-minded in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then I was suddenly restored the right to participate. I expected trouble when I got there, but it was eclipsed by other dramas -- like a Linden Lab staff person, a long time buddy of Taco's, punching out one of the top-paying enterprise customers in a bar. Yes, that was Second Life!

Taco and his pals kept a grudge, and I think he/they are the ones who created my vandalized Wiki -- not only the picture used lets me know that, but some other clues. Either he, or that Linden Lab staffer, who had long been harassing me inworld and out and who tried to "friend" me for a time but ultimately, I blocked him on Facebook because he was so creepy and violent.

If it isn't not him or one of his Phreak Radio buddies, then it could be the Woodbury University goons, of course, a California commuter college digital arts course where the professor and the students all decided to harass me for years -- again, because I blogged critically of their destructive antics inworld, racist and anti-gay attacks in the 4chan style, and also protested about their budget waste and wrote to the vice president of the college. Linden Lab seized their simulators -- not because of my protest but because of numerous other violations of the TOS which they committed and far more serious offenses -- on three separate occasions, or four, and they kept re-spawning alts -- even this week I had a bunch of them at my rental houses again with the same racist "little black boy" shtick, and particle spewing with posters of Osama bin Ladn. Lovely.

Some other candidates might be RevJimJesus who harassed me also for years on end, although I think has stopped -- and then this Mr. X, who began attacking me on Streetwise Professor's blog claiming falsely that I was La Russophobe, another blogger who is definitely not me or my alt. I do not blog with any anonymous alts; I want the credit for my blogging and I stand by my views.

The common theme of this handful of stalkers is that they want to discredit me as a thinker to others who might read my blog -- and bully me into silence. Obviously, this has never had an effect in the more than 10 years I've been blogging.

Lately, as the Internet topics I've been blogging about for years now have become more mainstream issues and even national scandals like the story of Snowden and the NSA, and as I've also expanded into blogging more about my region of expertise, Eurasia, I've picked up more hecklers (like Joshua Foust) who mine Google for stuff they can "get" on me and use to harass me -- and usually they recycle the same tired memes that I "hate gays" or "am a racist" or "am living in a psychiatric institution" -- all untrue, of course.

This latest attack feels a lot like Mr. X, who also goes by the name SenorEquis1776 and other handles, and seems plugged into the survivalists' movement. But it picks up Russian terms and Second Life memes in the way of my past stalkers, so I don't know if it is a tag-team or chance use. Lately I've noticed that some of the most vicious stalking of me in Second Life -- where a creep with a series of Woodbury/The Wrong Hands type names puts up effigies of my real-life self, with broken glasses, or bloody chopped up limbs or head, or being roasted over flames, etc. Lovely! Although those soft of attacks abated once Soft Linden (himself a creep who banned me from the bug tracker) finally got to work identifying who it was and hash-banning them.

10/26/2013

Here's Michael Anderson, one of my nemesises on Facebook, a documentary film-maker who covers Central Asia: "Michael has been the Central Asian correspondent
for Denmark’s Radio (Danish equivalent of the BBC), covering
events in the former Soviet Union since the late '80s. He has produced
numerous documentaries for Al Jazeera English."

This is the kind of person I run into all the time in my region of work and study, Eurasia. People who seem to "get it" about the awful regimes of Central Asia and even Russia, but who Blame America First and completely distract from the real dynamics of history and politics in the region -- more related to Russia and China than the US -- and of course their own governments' complicity and/or indifference in the EU.

So here's the kind of debate you get with these kind of people steeped in anti-Americanism -- throw in a Canadian who lives in the region who can hate America and call critics like me "Nazis" but admire Guriyev -- go figure. And then you get a Kyrgyz exile who lives in America, who owes America gratitude, but who buys the anti-government line of Glenn Greenwald.

In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the Soviet emigres who came to this country shared its ideals and supported either Reagan (negotiate from a position of military strength with the Soviets) or Carter (emphasize human rights and be prepared to boycott over mass crimes like the invasion of Afghanistan). There were almost never cases of the sort of rabid anti-Americanism you get now from people who were formally supporters of US policy.

How to explain this? Well, for one, US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just never got support, including from people like me. But at least I understood that the real problem in these regions was Iran, terrorists and the Taliban -- I didn't have the illusion that the deaths of people killed by *those* forces in these countries were "caused" by the presence of Americans. The hostile forces remain and keep killing even when we've left or are leaving. Who will they blame then? Will they finally have to face the facts?

I think there's another factor for Europeans, Canadians, and Eurasians -- they need a bonding factor, they need to belong, they want to feel themselves part of an edgy world elite that is not viewed as a client of any state. So anti-Americanism fulfills the role of binding them and giving them a hate target that instantly puts them on par with the established elites of the US and UK. It's a class marker, if you will, like ridiculing Palin or Wal-Mart.

I think for dissenters in Eurasia, it helps cover up the fact that they didn't challenge their own governments, but fled them. The dynamics are different these days. But I also blame indifferent and callous US government officials who don't concentrate on education of people whose education we pay for and whose refugee status we sponsor, and leave it to Marxists in universities or hostile NGOs. And of course the US silence on human rights violations in Central Asia for strategic reasons while they relied on them for the NDN supply route is something I've endlessly discussed on my blog Different Stans.

In any event, the results of these policies are stupid and ugly and now not easily undone.

Sometimes I think an efficient way to get these Blame American Firsters to stop whining and sneering is to cut off all their study and business visas for a time. Would that concentrate the mind wonderfully, that they couldn't come here and study and run businesses while they bash on Facebook? Of course, America will never do that because its values are for free speech and freedom of movement of people. But 90 days, would that work to reverse the trends? You rant about being spied on and you think (wrongly) America kills and tortures most people in the world (instead of Iran, Sudan, China, Russia, Pakistan, etc.). Maybe don't come here then? Would that help?

Of course if the US State Department were to do this, it would lead to only MORE outrage and Blame America First. It wouldn't likely work.

So I think the only thing to be done then is to keep debating people like this when they turn up in your feed.

People!
Let’s not forget the NSA spying was initiated by the Bush-Rummy-Cheney
bastards. And as soon as Obama came to power, he….

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Michael
Andersen there you go again obsessing about America. Is it a placebo
for all of politics everywhere for you? Spying is a legitimate activity
in a world with hostile forces. I'm going to assume you don't want the
Taliban and Al Qaeda to win. But of course, you minimize their harm and
the threat they represent. It's too bad we've helped enable you to do
that.

I'm
really not sure of your point. As an observer, I see Michael regularly
criticizing Uzbekistan state (he even has a documentary about andijan)
and other central Asian dictators, Putin and other Russian politicians,
Europe...See More

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Arslan
Jumaniyazov 90% of the time when @Michael Anderson is "criticizing
Uzbekistan," what he's actually doing is criticizing the US, which he
holds responsible for all of Uzbekistan's ills. I'm as critical of the
US on Uzbekistan and Uzbekistan itself
as any of you, but I do point out his silly, infantile anti-American
tilt that obscures the larger forces around Uzbekistan (Russia, China).
Here's my critique of Michael's film: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/...
The documentary bends over backward to Blame America First, which is
ridiculous. The US risked its base over criticism and then got kicked
out. As for his criticism of Putin, it comes far less than his regular
obsessiveness with America -- which is typical of West Europeans and now
we see it of course in people like you, who want to bond with West
Europeans and feel a sense of belonging, which you get by bashing
America, even though it's America institutions that likely paid for your
NGO grants and educational fellowships and of course is providing your
free Facebook now : ) There isn't "mass surveillance" against anybody.
This is mass hysteria on the part of Greenwald and Snowden. There is
legitimate surveillance of terrorists and other criminal suspects and
lawful intelligence targets. Yes, that includes Germany, which snuggles
close with the Kremlin and has a huge business presence in Russia and
Central Asia. Why aren't you more concerned about THAT? I can see the
main rationale in listening to Merkel's calls or anybody's is to see if
she was losing to the social democrats and the communists -- the very
freaks who were unconscionably willing to give the Sakharov Prize to
Snowden, and who would have moved even more close to the Kremlin had
they won and she lost. The US likes to get a heads up on things like
that. Meanwhile, remain in your bubble oblivious to the far worse
problem you have in the world: Russia.

Arslan Jumaniyazov Where
do you see me trying to bond with west Europeans? I just pointed out
that I do not see a correlation between a need to massively spy on
western Europeans, or the Brazilians, or listening to Merkel's phone
calls on the one hand, and fighting alqaeda on the other. I just don't
see it. As for living "in the bubble," you do seem to assume too much
about people you don't even know, don't you think?

Michael AndersenArslan Jumaniyazov,
I agree very much with the points you are making, and thanks.
Unfortunately, I am not sure that it is worth your time engaging too
much in debate with this woman, sorry, as she will just keep repeating
whatever she wants with no regard for facts, until the rest of us have
fallen asleep/gone to bed.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Arslan
Juaniyazov you're chiming in right here, dear, and indeed you do live
in the same bubble if you spout the same stuff. There is no proof that
the US "massively spies" on anyone. These are tendentious claims made by
radical activists who are bent
on harming the US government's reputation as much as possible. The US
spies on legitimate intelligence targets. That does include some
European figures who are relevant to counterintelligence -- and you
can't expect otherwise, given how your countries help the Russians. Say,
your friend Snowden claimed his leaks were merely about reform of the
US system or privacy issues, yet they involve turning allies against
the US, now. Interesting that, eh? Again, I could see that listening
into Merkel's phone calls *would* become likely because of Germany's
proximity to the Kremlin. Russia is an enemy, and has always been so. It
is not merely Al Qaeda one has to worry about when two refugees in the
US from Dagestan appear to have had some help executing their jihad in
Boston by the Russian FSB never telling the FBI what they knew about
them. To cite only one of many ways in which Russia is an enemy.

Saying
"There is no proof that the US 'massively spies' on anyone" is the
exact definition of living in a bubble. I do not need Snowden or
Greenwald to state that the NSA spies massively on millions of Americans
as well as non-Americans around
the world. That functioning was built into the institution of the NSA
from the very beginning. The US government has been a mass surveillance
state since the time of Woodrow Wilson.

Does
the NSA spy on legitimate targets? Sure, it does. But to state that
that's the only thing they do and assume that folks within the system do
not abuse that awesome power at their disposal is simply naivete. Nay,
it is ignorance of American history. Let's put Snowden aside and talk
of historical evidences. As a student of US political and cultural
history, I look at exactly that. If there is no massive spying, where
do we get declassified documents about NSA spying on civil rights
leaders in the '60s? Where do we get Nixon spying on his own cabinet
members, including Kissinger and then Kissinger in return wiretapping
Nixon's phone calls? (If they did that to each other, imagine how they
targeted others) Where do we get FBI and NSA spying on members of
Congress, journalists, dissidents? Where do we get documents showing
how critics of corporate and state corruption were targeted for
surveillance, harassment, and blackmail? The examples from the US
history when government spying had absolutely nothing to do with foreign
enemies is abundant. These are not figments of Snowden's imagination
but historical facts and there is a large bulk of documentary evidence
to prove them. I'll add just one as an example below.

Mass
surveillance was in place before there was Snowden. Now, the NSA's
reach has just increased tremendously thanks to the advances in
technology (the Internet, smartphones, cameras, etc.).

Barrie Hebb I
think Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick would make a great neo nazi. All of her
argumentation above are the exact excuses people used to support Hitler
and totalitarian regimes. We are better, let us rule the world and spy
on who we want, everyone is a potential
enemy - you do a great disservice to the people of the USA and the
world. You are not an American. You are a fascist in my view. And I have
no apology for being so blunt. You would gladly see my rights and
freedoms tossed to the sidelines for your grandeur view of a USA that
controls the world.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Arslan
Jamaniyazov the NSA does not spy "massively" on Americans. It
legitimately spies on legitimate intelligence/law enforcement targets.
Why do you believe the propaganda from WikiLeaks and Snowden? Try to be
more critical. If you can find some abuses
of this power, by all means, *find some concrete cases*. But on one has
come up with a single one. You are completely mixing up two different
eras, and that's actually what you need to understand. When in the
1960s, COINTELPRO spied on activists against the Vietnam War, or figures
like Martin Luther King, Jr., *we had proof, we had those cases*. This
led to reforms by Sen. Church and his committee. Where is the PROOF and
the CASE of the NSA spying on a congressman or journalist?! Trust me, if
these adversarial journalists like Greenwald *had* such proof, they'd
have long ago published it. But they don't, and they know that this is
the weakness of their case. I debated the ACLU and EFF at NYU University
and pointed this out, and they indeed concede: they don't have cases.
All they have are sweeping generalization, which they think is
sufficient to incite the mob. I don't. Finally, you show a curious
obsession with America, too, Arslan. You never look at your homeland or
Russia or China? Why is that? @Barrie Hebb you're just hysterical. Just
because I don't believe mass hysteria and anarchist hackers and radical
journalists about this issue doesn't mean I'm a "Nazi". You deprive the
word "Nazi" of all meaning if you're going to apply it just to somebody
who happens to lack religious belief in Glenn Greenwald! I haven't
advocated for any body's rights and freedoms to be tossed anywhere. In
fact, our rights and freedoms have been damaged by Snowden and co. as
they have made a liberal democratic state under the rule of law
dangerously vulnerable to very illiberal enemies like Al Qaeda and of
course Russia. Imagine, if someone has a different point of view,
suddenly they are "not an American" or "a fascist". This is insane.
*This is why we can't let people like you come to power, you are
Bolsheviks who will wildly take away people's freedoms.*

Barrie Hebb No
Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick, you are the ignorant person who has no idea
what freedom is, what people died form, or what the real America is
about. You are about excusing mass spying - and false threats to justify
murdering, raping and pillaging poor people worldwide. You are a poor
excuse for an adult. Once you are 18, sorry, you have no excuse. You are
responsible for your thoughts, and your expressions. If you truly
belive the rest of the world shlould be punished so harshly by brute US
government force for "threates you mentioned above which don't exist,
you belong in prison. You are a threat to global humanity. That is my
belief based on what you wrote. You talk about threats - but your
country has viciously attacked, murdered and raped people worlwide -
meanwhile you talk about these terrorists who have never ever ever
attacked the USA not even ONCE - yet you believe - and believe is the
perfect word - that you have the sole right to puinish iwth murder those
around the world. YOU AREA a DANGEROUS CRACKPOT - have you never been
to scholol - travelled, read books, met with people who are non white - I
would have a hard time believing so.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick @Barrie
Hebb you spend time in the former Soviet Union and YOU have no clue
about the *tens of millions of people* massacred in the greatest crimes
against humanity in history, in a name of an ideology you still share
and make excuses for by distract...See More

Eric Rice, [one of the early famous podcasters in California and promoter of social media] is a friend of mine from Second Life (his avatar's name in Second Life was Spin Martin). And I remember this tweet very well back in 2007. It was addressed to Jesse Malthus, another friend of ours — who put it on his profile in Second Life. Jesse Malthus was his avatar's name; his real name was Jesse Higginbotham,

It's great to see him immortalized in this way, he surely deserved it.

Like a lot of young people who die, Jesse's Twitter feed seems eerie and portentious.
But he wasn't a depressive or bully victim and didn't die of drugs or drunk driving -- he was just on his way to school early in the morning in a car full of kids driven by a gilfriend who lost control of the car.

Jesse and I used to get into huge arguments over the "copybot" issue - he was a member of the notorious libsecondlife which "liberated" the then-proprietary code of the viewer through reverse engineering, then got involved in deploying an inworld terror of merchants that instantly copied any object or avatar skin (although never server-side scripts, which is why coders who made a living selling scripts and animations could never grasp what copybot felt like in "little dress-maker genocide," the disgraceful term they used to openly ridicule the valid concerns of designers.)

I had no idea all those meetings we had at the Sutherland Dam (I used to hold a Friday-night salon to discuss the issues of the day) that Jesse was only 17 years old. I thought he was a 30-something IBM employee.

What was interesting to me about Jesse is that a) he told me the true story of who was responsible for copy-bot and expressed regret about its havoc in the world b) he worked to have his group yank the code from subversion until there were better checks and balances on this mayhem.

At that, at the age of 17 -- good parenting! Meanwhile, much older and more seasoned coders expressed rampant cynicism and hatred of anyone who valued copyright and advocated making as much uproar as possible with the monster to destroy the community -- and of course, to the glee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (it was in the early days of Second Life I began to first hear about them and their war on copyright).

It's funny to think of those early days on Twitter, which were very much connected to a lot of people in Second Life; they overlapped.

People who were already acquainted in SL began using Twitter as an "outworld" meta-communications platform to say some things that either might be censored on the company-run forums, famous like all MMORPGs for their bannings, or simply as a quick way to organize people inworld and outworld at once around common topics. Several enterprising coders made Second Life-Twitter relays and made word sculpture gardens with the tweets visible as banners wafting through the air in the 3D world -- I ran these for awhile myself until they broke due to some new patch either on Linden Lab's side or Twitter's side.

Second Life itself, in fact, had an inworld communications systems that enabled people to chat in real time and groups as large as 8,000 would all follow a conversation speeding by at once.
The artifacts of SL very much anticipated the issues and problems of social media to come in the following years, regarding intellectual property, privacy, surveillance, democracy.

Here Robert Scoble recalls Malthus:

It was @jmalthus who died in a car wreck this week. He was a Twitter friend of mine. So sad. Was only 17.